This post isn't a scientific evaluation or an A/B study. It's my personal opinion after trying to make Rust gamedev work for us, a small indie developer (2 people), trying to make enough money to fund our development with it. We're not one of those developers that have infinite money from an investor and years to burn. If you're in that category and are happy to build systems for years, none of the below will apply. I'm looking at things from the perspective of "I want to make a game in 3-12 months maximum and release it so that people can play it and I can make some money from it.". This is not written from a perspective of "I want to learn Rust and gamedev seems fun", which even though is a valid goal, is not in any way aligned with what we want, which is doing gamedev in a commercially viable and self-sufficient way.

We've released a few games across Rust, Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine, and many people played them on Steam. We also made our own 2d game engine with a simple renderer from scratch, and we also used Bevy and Macroquad for many projects over the years, some being very much non-trivial. I've also used Rust full-time at work as a backend developer. This post is not based on a short-sighted opinion of just going through a few tutorials or trying to make a small game for a game jam. We're well over 100k lines of Rust code written over 3+ years.

The goal of this post is to serve as a reference to dispel commonly said arguments that get repeated over and over. But again, this is a subjective opinion, and in big part being written so that I don't have to continually explain the same things over and over again when people ask. I'd like this to be a reference for why we're likely abandoning Rust as a gamedev tool. We're in no way stopping with game development, we're just stopping with game development in Rust.

If your goal is to learn Rust because it seems interesting and you like the technical challenge, that's completely fine. Part of what I want to appeal with this post is however how Rust gamedev is often presented, and advice that people often give out to others, without knowing whether they're building a tech demo or attempting to ship something. The community as a whole is overwhelmingly focused on tech, to the point where the "game" part of game development is secondary. As an example of this, I remember one time a discussion around the Rust Gamedev Meetup, that while was probably done jokingly was still imo illustrative of the issue, with something like "someone wants to present a game at the meetup, is that even allowed?" ... I'm not trying to say that people should have the same goals as we do, but I think maybe the way some things are communicated could be clearer, and that people should be more honest about what it is they're doing.